until death brings us together

yesterday my taxi driver read my palm, as he was driving. so it may have been a distracted reading, but whatever the case, he announced that i would get married not once but twice, and that money wasn't in my destiny. i told him i knew about the money, but asked when the wedding bells would start ringing. that, he couldn't tell me.

like so many others, the taxi driver had lost family and property in the earthquake that hit the north last week. for me the earthquake, no doubt a human tragedy, capped a month of personal tumult, and i've been left reeling wondering what it means to be so heartbroken over personal matters when such large-scale devastation surrounds me. not that the earthquake hasn't shaken my emotional grounding as well, it certainly has, but it inevitably gets mixed with and then finally superceded by the personal. but maybe that's just because it's been a particularly personal week in a particularly personal month. and i'm determined to remain paricularly vague about it.

i wanted to go north to help out with some up-close hands-on relief work. but unfortunately, things remain quite uncoordinated, so much so that UN officials have warned of a "disaster within a disaster." that seems the order of the day all around these days. new orleans comes to mind. unless you're a doctor or a nurse or an experienced relief worker or have some kind of hook up, seems like going north you'd end up being a disaster within a disaster within the disaster. and that's just too much meta for me to handle.

so i'll have to be satisfied helping from here. donating and packing boxes and feeling so bourgeois as i do it. not that this should be about me. but that's the problem isn't it. it's always about you, in the end.

in the end, we all die anyway. that's the way i've been justifying and interpreting a lot of things going on in my life right now. i don't know if it's a very positive or mature vantage point, but nevertheless, it speaks to me sometimes. your heart is broken? it's alright, we're all going to die. you got no direction? well, we're all going to the grave. you're muslim she's catholic? we're all going to hell. you got no future? none of us do. your girlfriend left you? you're heading to the same place. you're sunni he's shia? we're all going to die. seems like the great equalizer in life. the penicillin of our petty troubles. maybe when you realize your own mortality, you see the other person's humanity. or, you just don't care anymore.

**
or, to veer from the negative, you realize that one thing matters, in personal terms, amongst all your small concerns and worries and ambitions and identities based on division: happiness. but then why so elusive?